Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  There was only one positive side for Lenin in this crumbling of the faction in Russia: he and Zinoviev were left to develop their ideas and pursue their activity unhindered by fellow leaders in the Russian Empire. They revived the émigré central factional newspaper Social-Democrat and could print their own articles without referring to others. Social-Democrat could then be carried by courier for dissemination in Russia. A journal of Marxist theory was also set up in conjunction with a group of young Russian writers led by Nikolai Bukharin and Georgi Pyatakov at Baugy-sur-Clarens in the suburbs of Montreux in Switzerland.

  Yet these successes meant little in the face of further setbacks experienced by Lenin. Not only did the post take weeks between Russia and Switzerland, but also Lenin had fewer contacts in Russia than at any time since he had first become an emigrant in 1900. The confidential political address-book maintained by Nadezhda Konstantinovna contained only twenty-six persons who lived not in emigration but in the Russian Empire, and sixteen of these were no longer active by the end of 1916. The Okhrana had success in trimming back the already slim size of the faction. Of the ten addresses that remained operational through the war, only three were outside Petrograd, Moscow and Siberian exile.19 Nadezhda Konstantinovna was getting desperate. ‘We need direct relations’, she wrote, ‘with other towns.’20 But she was crying into the wind. Most of the correspondence – indeed virtually all of it – had to be passed through the conduit of Shlyapnikov and Anna Ulyanova if it was to reach the rest of the disparate faction; and Shlyapnikov had to keep travelling to Alexandra Kollontai in Oslo in order to pick up what Lenin had written. It was a frail apparatus with which to try to make revolution in Russia.

  14. LASTING OUT

  1915–1916

  In January 1917, Lenin gave his most pessimistic speech ever to a meeting of young Swiss socialists at the Volkshaus in Zurich:1

  We, the old people, perhaps won’t survive until the decisive battles of this forthcoming revolution. But it occurs to me that it’s with a large amount of confidence that I can articulate the hope that the young people who work so wonderfully in the socialist movement of Switzerland and the entire world will have the happiness of not only fighting but also of winning victory in the forthcoming proletarian revolution.

  Since the 1890s his premise had been that socialist revolution across Europe was imminent. Now he was saying he might not live to witness it.

  Whenever he had got moody before the Great War, he had been worrying not about European socialist revolution but about internal factional politics. This he confided in a letter to Inessa Armand:

  Oh, how those ‘little matters of business’ are mere fakes of the real business, surrogates of the business, a real obstacle to the business in the way that I see the fuss, the trouble, the little matters – and how I’m tied up with them inextricably and forever!! That’s a sign more [sic. This sentence and the next one were written by Lenin in English] that I am lazy and tired and in a poor humour. Generally I like my profession and yet often I almost hate it.

  Lenin did not bother about the criticisms aimed at him by persons who were not Marxists, but he was depressed by the wartime disputes among Bolsheviks. He became so edgy that he did not trust himself to speak in public. After New Year 1917 he wrote privately: ‘I wouldn’t want to travel to Geneva: (1) I’m not well; my nerves are no good. I’m scared of giving lectures; (2) I’m booked here for 22 January, and I’ve got to prepare for a speech in German. For this reason I don’t promise to come.’2

  Nor was Lenin living in his customary comfort. His mother’s death on 14 July 1916 terminated the pension she shared with her children whenever they fell on hard times. The Bolshevik factional treasury had also fallen away. The Bolsheviks were no longer operating openly in Russia and Pravda had been closed down by the Imperial government. The number of active Bolshevik adherents had collapsed. Most of them anyway no longer shared Lenin’s opinions. Anna Ilinichna, working for the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, did what she could and asked him for a statement of his basic monthly requirements.3 But the money coming from Petrograd was never going to be enough; other sources of income had to be found. Lenin and Nadya tried to obtain commissions as freelance authors; the snag was that they wrote in Russian and had to find their publishers in distant, wartime Russia. Yet Nadya devised a project for a Pedagogical Encyclopaedia whose potential readership would not be confined to Marxist activists. Lenin, too, sought to write little pieces for money. It was a difficult task for both of them.

  They economised by starting to eat horsemeat rather than beef and chicken. They bought no new clothes even though Lenin, a stickler for looking tidy, began to seem rather grubby in his old suit and walking boots. In February 1916 they moved to cheaper lodgings at Spiegelgasse no. 14 in Zurich, where the cobbler Titus Kammerer sublet rooms to them.4 Spiegelgasse was a neat, leafy street; it had been there, at no. 12, that the German dramatist Georg Büchner wrote his play Woyzeck eighty years before. But Lenin and Nadya felt rather sorry for themselves. Next door to the house lay the shop of Herr Ruff, a butcher who made his own sausages.5 Lenin, who avoided oily products because of his delicate stomach, was disgusted by the smell and dropped his ritual of aerating a room even in cold weather. The windows were kept constantly closed.6

  Yet the Ulyanovs enjoyed the acquaintance of fellow inhabitants of the building. Among them were a German conscript’s family, an Italian man and a couple of Austrian actors with a beautiful ginger kitten. Kammerer’s wife Luisa captivated Lenin, who admired and shared her belief that soldiers should turn their rifles against their own governments. Luisa also taught Nadya some of the tricks needed to buy food cheaply and cook it quickly. Nadya rather overdid things by going out and buying meat on one of the two days per week when the Swiss government had appealed to citizens not to buy meat because of wartime shortages in supply. Whether Nadya made a mistake or had flouted the regulations is uncertain, but on returning from the shops she asked Frau Kammerer how on earth the federal authorities of Switzerland could ensure that its proclamation would be obeyed. Did it send investigators round to people’s homes? Frau Kammerer laughed, saying that only the middle class would refuse to show a sense of civic responsibility. The working class, she exclaimed, were very different. Then she added, to ease Nadya’s conscience, that the proclamation ‘didn’t apply to for-eigners’.7

  Lenin admired the Kammerers as exemplary proletarians, ignoring the fact that they were not workers but a ‘petit-bourgeois’ couple who ran a shop and sublet apartments. Really they were little capitalists and Lenin was seeing and hearing what he wanted. Having found a family who shared many of his political assumptions, he persuaded himself that they belonged to a social class of which he approved: the proletariat. The Kammerers’ respect for the public good encouraged him in his basic assumptions. Lenin in 1917 was to stress the need for the state and the workers to ‘check and supervise’ the fulfilment of revolutionary objectives. The ideas for the October Revolution came from many sources. Marx supplied many of them in his voluminous writings. Frau Luisa Kammerer was unknowingly reinforcing one or two others.

  Thus Lenin felt sustained in his Marxist faith. Through Marx and Engels he ‘knew’ that the future would bring about a final and wonderful stage in world history. His life had purpose. Lenin clung to a rock of attitudes and assumptions, and on it he was able to construct almost any notions about politics and economics he wanted. Overtly he claimed that Marxism had a readily identifiable logic that permitted the development of one single policy for any given situation. But this was pretence. What he really assumed by this was that his own version of Marxism was the sole authentic one. He held to this assumption even though his version of Marxism and, to an even greater extent, his practical policies changed a great deal over his long career. His faith had survived many years of emigration. Only a few of the Marxists of the 1880s were still alive and active by the Great War. Lenin was one of them, and such was his inner confidence that he felt no pressur
e to question the way he operated as a politician. And so whenever the current situation looked bleak – in the faction, in the international socialist movement, in the family, in his marriage, even in his physical and mental well-being – he could do something about it. He could look forward to the radiant future.

  History, he trusted, was on his side. Or rather he thought that he was on the side of History. Lenin’s bouts of depression were serious but temporary. That a European socialist revolution would eventually occur, with or without him, he had not the slightest doubt. Despite the concerns expressed in his address to the Swiss young socialists, he more usually believed that it would not take long for this revolution to break out. For most of the war, he had gone round predicting a general revolutionary explosion. This indeed was the bone of contention between him and so many socialist writers. Kautsky, Martov and others refused to accept that he had proved his case that Europe’s working classes could easily be brought into revolutionary activity against their national governments. Nor did they believe it sensible to concentrate on splitting the socialist movement in each country. How, they asked, could socialists lead a united European working class if they were themselves divided? Lenin’s other critics, notably Plekhanov, went further and suggested that most German workers were so patriotic that they would drop lip-service to the ‘internationalist’ principles of the Second International in the event of Germany’s military defeat of Russia.

  To those few persons who followed Lenin’s professional activities, then, he seemed a cantankerous, somewhat unhinged utopian. But this did not trouble him. He continued to declare that the Romanov monarchy was a likely casualty of the war. He repeated that Nicholas II had done the Bolsheviks a favour by engaging in armed conflict with Germany. Revolution in Russia was on the immediate agenda. Indeed Lenin argued that the overthrow of tsarism was not merely desirable for its own sake but was one of the prerequisites for revolution in the rest of Europe. Tsarism, according to Lenin, was ‘1,000 times worse than [German] Kaiserism’.8 The regime in Petrograd was allegedly so powerful and reactionary that its removal was crucial for socialists to be able to make revolutions elsewhere in Europe. Lenin put it as follows: ‘The bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is now already not merely a prologue but an inalienable, integral part of the socialist revolution in the West.’9

  During the wartime years, moreover, Lenin dabbled with strategic ideas to compress the schedule of Revolution. He had last done this in 1905, and now again he pondered whether the Bolsheviks were right to accept the idea that socialism in any country had to be introduced in two stages. Contemporary conventional Marxism held that there would first occur a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ which would consolidate democracy and capitalism and that only subsequently would there take place a socialist revolution putting the working class into power. Lenin came back to this in the Great War and urged left-wing Marxists to abandon ‘the theory of stages’.10 Thus he was showing a willingness to consider the possibility of making a socialist revolution without the need for an intermediate bourgeois-democratic revolution. His own version of the two-stage revolutionary process in any case had always been controversial. In particular, the proposal for a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ had seemed to most people – apart from fellow Bolsheviks – a scheme for instant socialism. In 1916 his sense of urgency about strategy and schedule returned to him: no chance should be lost by Marxists to seize and keep power in Petrograd.

  Lenin’s impatience was sharpened by his perception of the alternative scenarios. On the one hand, he did not think it unfeasible that Russia might defeat Germany; on the other hand, he did not discount the possibility that Nicholas II, if his armies continued to be defeated, would sign a separate peace on the eastern front with Germany and Austria–Hungary. If Nicholas proved too inflexible, furthermore, he might be pushed aside by the anti-socialist parties in the State Duma. According to Lenin, this might happen in several ways. Perhaps the moderate conservative groups led by Alexander Guchkov and the liberals under Pavel Milyukov might form a political coalition and somehow force Nicholas II to give way to them. Another option might be that Milyukov would ally with the right-wing Social-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski. Lenin urged that all such scenarios could and should be pre-empted by revolutionary action led by Bolsheviks.

  But what would his socialist government look like? Lenin addressed this question in notebooks he started to fill in 1916. He did not do this on his own. The small group of leading young Bolsheviks based in Baugy-sur-Clarens in Switzerland had ideas on this and were equally impatient to make a revolution. Nikolai Bukharin, in particular, did not think that the administrative and coercive agencies of advanced capitalist states should simply be taken over and reformed by socialists. Instead he argued that the entire capitalist state ought to be destroyed. In justification, he pointed to the extraordinary growth of state power within the advanced capitalist countries. Such states had developed unprecedentedly efficient and ruthless methods of political, social and economic control. They had even proved capable of suborning their respective socialist parties and using them to maintain the loyalty of the working class. Consequently it would be naive for Marxists to leave intact the existing state institutions – the civil service, the army and the economic regulatory bodies – once they had overturned the ancien régime. Bukharin asserted that this was the fundamental mistake of Karl Kautsky. Socialism had to build a revolutionary state anew.

  At first Lenin attacked Bukharin’s thought as anarchistic. The older man resented the intrusion of the bright younger writer into his domain of Marxist theory. But Lenin steadily changed his stance. Bukharin had identified a principal difficulty that would be encountered in the establishment of a socialist administration; he had also very commendably exposed a further weakness in Kautsky’s thought. What Bukharin had failed to do was to explain how a socialist administration might ever be established. Lenin turned this over in his mind and came to the conclusion that the Russian workers’ movement of 1905 provided the solution. In his notebooks he explored the idea that the workers’ soviets could be the instrument for introducing socialism. Helped along by Bukharin, Lenin had arrived at a position that would have a decisive impact on later events. The seeds of strategy for the October Revolution of 1917 were germinating in Switzerland even before the Romanov monarchy’s downfall. As yet Lenin was not quite sure of himself. He needed time to elaborate his notions, but he was committed to them in their outline form.

  Neither Lenin nor Bukharin was the first Bolshevik to try to work out in detail how the ‘bourgeois state’ could most effectively be eradicated. Before the Great War his rival Alexander Bogdanov had argued that the prerequisite for the introduction of socialism was the development of a wholly ‘proletarian culture’. ‘Bourgeois culture’ had to be eliminated because of its adherence to concepts of individualism, absoluteness and authoritarianism. Bogdanov felt that no socialist revolution could succeed unless a cultural as well as a political and economic transformation accompanied it.

  Even in 1916 Lenin declined to go this far, and the reasons for his reluctance tell us a lot about his kind of socialism. He continued to believe that there was such a thing as an absolute truth and that such truth was discoverable by the individual intellectual acting in adherence to Marx’s doctrines. The contrast with Bogdanov could not have been greater. Bogdanov wanted to encourage the workers to dispense with supervision by middle-class intellectuals and to formulate their own collectivist culture and explore new forms of social experience. Lenin concurred that there was a need for cultural development among the working class. But the need, he argued, was of a restricted nature. Workers needed to be taught to be literate, numerate and punctilious. Lenin thought that Bogdanov was just a dreamer and that the working class, in order to carry through a revolution, needed to have the technical accomplishments which ‘bourgeois culture’ alone could provide. Thus the ‘bourgeois state’ but not ‘b
ourgeois culture’ had to be extirpated. Consequently no rapprochement was feasible. As always, Lenin had his own agenda. He thought politically. The soviets, he surmised, would offer the means whereby the socialist revolution would be prevented from taking the path of compromise and betrayal already followed by Europe’s greatest Marxist party, the German Social-Democratic Party.

  He trusted as strongly as ever in the correctness of Marxism, in the vanguard party, in the predictability of ‘historical development’, in the virtues of urbanism and industrialism, in capitalism’s inevitable collapse, in class struggle, in the imminence of the European socialist revolution. And about the need for dictatorship he also did not waver. He did not mind being the solitary factional fighter: he preferred this to any option that would involve him in compromising deeply felt convictions. He stuck to his polemical style unrepentantly. Again and again he claimed that he was merely defending and elaborating the precepts of Marxist orthodoxy.

  Yet he recognised that Kautsky had shared several precepts of this orthodoxy. Kautsky had been among his heroes. There must therefore have been something wrong, thought Lenin, about the way Kautsky had arrived at the precepts. Lenin set himself the task of examining the roots of Kautsky’s Marxism. By digging down in this way, he was inevitably engaged not only in looking at Kautskyanism but also in self-investigation. He did not say this openly. Indeed he did not say this to anyone at all. He confided his researches to his notebooks; and although he tried to produce a philosophical article on the subject, he did not have the time to finish it before events in Russia called him away from Switzerland in 1917. But he read avidly in the Bern Public Library and quickly came to a startling conclusion, which he put as follows in his notebooks:11